


The Thousand Arms

by bioluminesce



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Eldritch, Gen, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, canon compliant which means kylo ren happens to be there, it's about rey tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:28:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21878149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bioluminesce/pseuds/bioluminesce
Summary: I am Rey. And we are the thousand arms and thousand eyes of the history of the Force.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11





	The Thousand Arms

We feel the Force burning. 

In the cold, black ritual room in the depths of the Final Order, we raise two lightsabers. 

We have always been here. We are Rey, newest Master, egg-bright and ancient. We have always been in the Force, working alongside Poe and Finn, living on Jakku for years and hibernating years. We are Rey. I am Rey, not scavenger but Jedi tinkerer. 

Under the lashes of the Sith’s power, we are dying. 

All of the Jedi stand together, and feel this death coming together, and reel together. It’s a pleasant embrace, but more overwhelming than I expected. I wish I could have told Leia it would be like this. Did she know? Had she felt this lineage? Is this a new thing? Their voices fill my ears. Their images parade across the black walls in rainbow color. Desert dust and city grime are scents from their memories, not mine. 

Mine. I am myself, but I skim over my own memories as if they were someone else’s. The Force was always with me, even when I didn’t know it. The Force screamed in my head, drowning people out. The Force was a rip in space and time, letting a freezing void in. That void was never cold like space, though, never unwelcoming: it wrapped me up like armor, like a second skin. That which insulates also muffles. The Force shone around me in my own shape, whistling in my ears like wind through an echoing cave. 

We remember Finn beside us on the _Millennium Falcon_ , and worry because we cannot possibly explain to him that which we do not already know. Hang on, we beg. Wait for me again as we have waited for one another so many times. 

We saw ourselves in the cave on Ach-To, echoed one thousand times, but we could not recognize ourselves. My eyes were not ready.

We sat in the sand on Jakku, wearing a Rebellion helmet from a dead pilot, and wondered why that artifact and that play-pretend game felt right. (It felt right because it was what we wanted. It made our wreckage feel more like a home. It centered us. That, of all things, was not just us. The desire to leave Jakku was mine.)

We don’t have time to negotiate every moment now. They flash in front of us, and we cannot choose. In which part of our lives were we Rey? In which were we the Jedi lineage? Which was both? We are certain about only this moment. 

And this moment hurts terribly. We raised our lightsabers as a shield against the lightning, but it sparks and curves and drops down around us, singeing our cheeks and our forearms and our hands. But we are all the Jedi, and we are moving forward. 

We push. We are a culmination. We are not new to me, although it is a shimmering and strange idea to know what I have known all along. 

We burn the Sith to the ground. We feel their life force go out and the cataclysmic shock of its release brings parts of the ceiling thundering to the floor. 

We are left alone, exhausted. We feel the Force burning. We lose time. 

We wake up whole. Tired, yes. My body is a three-day hike in high summer. But I am alive, held off the cold floor by the soft warmth of another, singular, person. I had been so conflicted about him, and still am, even as the relief and the exhaustion create some vast unnameable affection. Thank you, my enemy, who taught me to be better than you are. Would you like to meet the Jedi Masters that I am? I fall back into the rushing, streaming crowd of them for a moment, giving myself to the Force as I did in front of the emperor. 

We reach for Ben Solo with our thousand arms. We gather him to ourselves. Gather bloody hands with the knuckles standing up like mountain ranges, gather thick hair grimy with sweat, gather breath smelling of ozone and ash. We feel disgust and joy and grief together.

We do not know what Ben Solo feels, and that is strange because there are so many of us I think perhaps everyone is one of us now, one of the Jedi Masters, and why can’t I feel all of them in the great stream? But he is not there. He is something else apart from us, and that is a joy too: brings a new voice to the gathering. 

We rest him on the cool stone. 

We feel the Force also cool. In one last wild swing the scale has tipped too far one way and too far the other, and now we feel the energy bleeding out of the mechanism, the balance returning. We take a deep breath. Our concerns are Rey’s concerns—where is Finn? We can feel him, out there among the scarred and smoking fleets. He can feel us, and that is a glory and a surprise and a delight. We have grown enough that we can recognize the way the Force stirs in him. 

We feel ourselves retreating, forming into an orderly line of advice, reassurance, and certainty behind my eyes. I am Rey. We are the thousand arms and thousand eyes of the history of the Force. And I will balance this individual and this crowd, this hero who trades in life forces and this woman who wants, right now, nothing more than to put my own two thin, cold arms around my friends. 

We are the Jedi. 

And we want to go back, to the fleet, to what we now know is home.


End file.
